Marketing teams are under constant pressure to go to market faster, yet many face recurring bottlenecks that slow their progress. Resource inefficiencies, team constraints and misaligned goals are a few of the most typical culprits. While these challenges can feel overwhelming, solving them is critical for driving growth and ensuring long-term success.
Paula Ximena Mejia, VP of enterprise marketing of Wix Studio, is a marketing leader with years of experience solving these exact challenges across customer success, e-commerce and inbound marketing.
Simply speaking, a marketing bottleneck is when a team’s unable to produce campaigns or assets as quickly as they need to, Mejia explains.
“I believe sometimes managers will feel it, but not as much because the people on the bottom will feel it,” she says.
“So it looks loads like five rounds of reviews where briefs have to be reconstructed. It looks like team frustration. It looks like missed deadlines and customarily the sense of things going too slow.
It’s a scenario that almost all marketers will likely recognise, according to Mejia. “It’s a particularly frustrating position to be in from a team viewpoint, but in addition from a marketing goal viewpoint. It’s quite toxic, because marketers are in a really fast paced environment where you might be competing for attention, and the way in which you might be able to compete is by putting your content in front of your audience at the fitting time.
“If it takes you too long to try this, you then’re unable to type of get the feedback loops you wish so as to create probably the most efficient processes, and also you won’t find a way to get probably the most out of your resources, whether that’s budget or people.”
The bottlenecks are more than likely to occur when marketing teams don’t keep the ‘why’ front of mind.
Marketers concentrate on goals. They understand the goal of any particular campaign they’re working on. But why is it the goal? It’s a key step in the method that Mejia believes is skipped.
“In marketing, you may also get caught up in vanity metrics, and what number of likes something gets, she says. “I’m not saying that those metrics will not be relevant. They very much will be. It just will depend on why it’s vital. And it’s not because a post went viral that you just are necessarily succeeding.
“You need to understand the way it’s connected to your larger goal. So it’s each the goal and it’s the why. And this really trickles down from the team plan for the quarter or the yr, down to the particular campaign.”
As far as Mejia is anxious, marketing briefs are sacred, but so is quarterly planning, because those documents, although they she admits they’ll feel a tad bureaucratic, are crucial in keeping marketing managers aligned with company leadership when it comes to quarterly planning, and keeping themselves aligned with their teams when it comes to deciding what varieties of campaigns they’re working on, why they’re working on them and, ultimately, what success looks like.
“Those are really vital pillars to be certain that things don’t get messy and crumble,” says Mejia.
But there are three key actionable strategies to free up these bottlenecks and help marketing teams turn into more agile and efficient:
• Structuring teams to maximise efficiency,
• Defining key roles that each team will need to have, and
• Selecting the fitting tech stack to streamline operations and collaboration.
Team structure
“There was a trend for some time to go for very specialised marketing roles, and there are situations where you’ll need knowledgeable content author to write really great content,” says Mejia.
“But I believe that when your team requires more agility, having generalists which you could plug and play in several situations could be a very strong advantage when it comes to creating more agile work and testing more often.
“I’ve definitely fallen into the trap of considering I really want a specialist that works only on this area, after which goals modified and specific targets we had shifted. All of a sudden that specialty was completely irrelevant to the thing that I had to deliver. And then you’ve gotten to take into consideration restructuring.”
Teams can take a protracted time to put together, and also you’re never really done constructing them, notes Mejia.
“It’s not like, ‘oh, I finally hired everyone and we’ll just work and it’ll be amazing forever’. Because things are at all times changing. So once you work in a extremely dynamic environment, which marketing tends to be, I find that once you construct a team with many generalists, you might be more easily able to adapt to those changes.
“That’s very specific to my experience at Wix today. I do know that there are some situations where you will want some specialists, but I believe that it’s a very good way to prepare for the potential of change, which in my job is 100% guaranteed.”
Key roles
As far as key roles are concerned, Mejia says you certainly need an operations manager once you’re eager about processes and ensuring the whole lot is optimised.
She explains: “Depending on how much headcount you’ve gotten available to you, you’ll have a hybrid, someone that’s really project management-oriented and process-oriented, doing that and something else. But I do think that there’s the necessity to have this as a responsibility for somebody within the team that would even be the manager, depending, again, on the dimensions and the skill set.
“I find that when you’ve gotten someone who’s being measured on how smooth the processes are, how well the whole lot is working, how clear the goals are for everybody within the team, it just tends to unlock loads. And I really like writers and designers and product marketing managers. They’re all very talented people, but I believe in the event you just allow them to be, the processes can get slightly bit murky and and unexpectedly, deadlines don’t get set, right? Because you’re doing all your thing and dealing in your piece, whatever it is likely to be, and you then need someone there to have those very clear deadlines and find a way to work backwards from those. Tell people, ‘okay, if this is going on in 4 weeks, content needs to be done by then, and design needs to be done by then. And should we want to move that in a technique or one other, there needs to be a superb reason.”
The right tech
As well as assembling the fitting people on a team, having the fitting technological tools for them to use can also be vital.
“I used to be talking to a whole lot of marketers in the summertime,” Mejia explains. “And someone was telling me about their tech stack for his or her marketing team. It included three CRMs and all forms of things where there was a lot redundancy. It’s expensive and it’s complicated, and it actually makes the work harder, actually.
“I believe everyone who’s managing a marketing team needs to be certain that they’re doing a tech stack audit. Whether you own the responsibility of your software or not, at the tip of the day you can be the user.
“An audit is there to enable you understand what you’ve gotten, because, as an illustration, you may have licenses you didn’t even know you had, and so they’re just wasting resources within the background.
It’s also vital to understand how the several software licenses you’ve gotten available connect with one another. If there’s an overlap, is there a reason for that?
Mejia says: “Maybe there’s a capability that A has that B doesn’t have, and that’s why you wish each. But probably not, right? There might be an answer that may encompass all of them.
“Making sure that the team you’ve gotten and the software you’ve gotten aligns is de facto vital. So you may be in a situation where some software is amazingly technical, but not everyone in your team is amazingly technical. So is that a bottleneck? Some CMSs require developers or a really technical person.
“If you’re creating digital assets, that becomes a bottleneck. But it may not be. You may not need that level of technical skill for the varieties of resources you’re creating, so just be certain that you just are up to date with what you’re using, the way it’s working, after which take a take a look at what’s available on the market.
“Because in the event you bought your software five years ago, especially with all of the stuff that’s been happening with AI previously two years, there could also be a lot better, more advanced solutions available to you. And then, in fact, in the event you are sharing this information along with your finance team or your IT team, tell them, ‘we checked out all these things and it seems I don’t need 50 seats for this license, and I might actually relatively reduce those two and get this one as a substitute’.
“They’ll be pretty joyful. I believe that they’ll get on board, and also you’ll have a much stronger partnership with those teams.”
And Mejia says all this while still acknowledging that there’s a whole lot of pressure on marketers and marketing leaders. “It’s all about ROI, and grow this and grow that,” she says. “So possibly the concept of also owning responsibility in your tech stack sounds daunting. But, for me, it’s as vital as saying you wish to be chargeable for the people who work under you.”
Focusing on the structure of your marketing team, defining those key roles and really nailing your tech stack can go a good distance towards eliminating the marketing bottlenecks and, ultimately, help achieve whatever targets you’ve set.
Simply put, Mejia says: “Take a take a look at what you’re planning to do and be very honest with themself about what you’re thinking that is definitely value doing – and cut out the remainder.”
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